Sunday, 14 September 2025 — Investigating Imperialism
By William Bowles
Your Party is the latest attempt to create a new party of the Left in the UK
Blimey, what a rollercoaster! I’ve never been a fan of Corbyn, even less, Corbynism (whatever that is) and I have never viewed him as a socialist, more of a liberal-lefty type, with his heart no doubt in all the ‘right places’ but above all, Corbyn is a Party Man, the Labour Party being his entire life, or rather, he was, until he was unceremoniously booted out after getting on for fifty years of loyal service. This alone should have taught him something about what the Labour Party is really all about. But has it? Is the nascent Your Party about to repeat the past, only this time as farce? Your Party’s beginnings do not bode well with all the usual suspects scrambling for position in the party’s pecking order. Not a pretty sight. And lurking in plain sight is the dead hand of the Zionist lobby.
So what is Your Party all about? I, along with 750-800,000 or more, other people, enthusiastically added my signature to the YP’s birth, more out of desperation that anything else and I suspect I was not alone in this being the motivation with apparently, Corbyn being the magnet for most. But now the dust has settled (somewhat), a more sober-minded appraisal is needed and the view is not pretty, nor especially encouraging. And this not the first attempt in recent times to create a new party of the left: Enough is Enough launched by the trade union movement in 2022 attracted 700,000 supporters[1].
YP is, in part a response to the traitorous trajectory of the Labour Party, the other half of capitalist rule for over a century; a response to fifteen years of austerity; the crisis of the health system; of disastrous imperialist wars and the climate crisis. Add to this the rise of neo-fascism that’s a sign of yet another crisis of the capitalist order and of course, Palestine. In a phrase, the perfect storm. But is YP the right kind of response to this reality or yet another rehash of the same, tired, vaguely left-liberal responses we have witnessed over the past twenty-something years and which have actually contributed to our current predicament? In other words, have we been here before? Respect Party, the Workers Party, the various iterations of some kind of socialist party? What does this tell us about the state of the left in the UK? Do we in fact, have a political culture, for example, the way the French and the Italians do, that potentially anyway, can produce the kind of ideas necessary to confront capitalism? Because, after all, if all we are trying to do is reproduce a left/reformist version of some idealised vision of the post-war Labour government with its imperialist-colonialist ideology, papered over with the NHS and the nationalisation of bankrupt major industries, designed to placate the working class, then YP will fail to gain any real support beyond the initial euphoria. Can Corbyn and the small group of left MPs and a ragtag of groups be trusted at this critical juncture, to advocate for a real socialist alternative out of this crisis?
What YP and most of the rest of the left seem determined to ignore, is the crisis of capital and the looming possibility of war on Russia. The rise of the neo-fascists is a wakeup call to the left, one which they appear to be ignoring at their peril. A crisis is being engineered by the deeply unpopular governments of the UK, France, Germany and the lesser powers of Europe, in order to maintain their grip on power and deflect their populations from the reality of their situation. The British economy, is in effect, bankrupt, with government debt over £72 billion, a shrinking economy, inflation, unemployment and growing social unrest. This is the context within which the various progressive forces are bickering with each other over who will be in charge but in charge of what exactly? The attempt to create a new party of the left, without a programme, whose supporters, all 800,000 of us, are being fought over by a posse of very divided, professional politicos, is deeply offensive given the reality of our situation and speaks reams about the parlous state of our political culture, or lack of it, in the UK. The major issue that confronts the left is how to resolve this contradiction? Can it be resolved or are the contradictions intrinsic to the nature of the left of this country?
A left imbued with the culture of imperialism and anti-communism? This view is borne out by the obvious disagreements between the Corbyn faction and the Sultana faction, though because these disagreements appear to be taking place behind closed doors, we can only speculate as to the exact nature of them but it’s only question of time before these differences become public. Frankly, I find the conflict deeply disturbing. What of the hundreds of thousands of people who have signed up to YP, the great majority of whom are not political activists, who have joined YP most likely because of their belief in Corbyn, that has unfortunately been transformed into ‘Corbynism’? I’m not even sure what the so-called Sultana faction stands for aside from the highly emotive statements she has made except it seems to be some kind of left of Labour position.
What will Your Party become? On the one side, we have Corbyn’s liberal/left of old Labour politics, with positions that don’t really address the major issues that confront us. And on the other, we have Sultana and the Independent Alliance, six MPs plus whoever are allied to them. Sultana claims that she wants to return to the socialist politics of the old Labour Party! So are the two sides so far apart? Well the one issue that does separate them is the issue of Palestine and Zionism. Sultana has stated publicly that she is an anti-Zionist, Corbyn has avoided being drawn on his position and his closest ‘advisors’ appear to be Zionists! It would suggest an intractable divide that can only be resolved by a split, or an unpalatable compromise.
And what of these existing left parties, what is their relationship to YP? There seem to be four or perhaps five, major parties on the left, though major might be an exaggeration: the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP); the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP); the Leninist/Stalinist Communist Party of Britain (CPB) and of course, George Galloway’s Workers Party (WP) that claims to be socialist, though Galloway himself, is not. There are other parties including the Trotskyist Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB) that has been around since the 1930s that claims not to be a party! So the existing left is dominated by Trotskyist parties, that in my opinion, are the kiss of death as far as offering a viable alternative to capitalism. It’s not a pretty sight. Then there’s Roger Hallam’s Extinction Rebellion (XR) and the proposal for incorporating ‘Citizen’s Assemblies’ into the mix. XR stands well outside the traditional left parties and I’m not sure how it connects as it can’t described as a political party, more of a social movement but nevertheless, XR seems to be ‘plugged in’ to YP at a pretty high level. Apparently, XR gained entry via Corbyn aide, James Schneider.[2]
So behind the scenes these various and sundry parties of the left are ‘waiting in the wings’ so-to-speak, though it would seem that thus far, they have been kept at arms length (aside from XR) from directly participating in the formative process but it’s early days and depending on how the founding conference is organised, will depend on what kind of a role, if any, these parties will play. Will they be independent ‘factions’ within YP or not? Clearly, both the Corbyn and Sultana groups are leery of these established parties participation, especially given the tactic that ‘entryism’[3] plays in Trotskyist tactics. They will also be very sensitive to being red-baited by the MSM and the state, especially after the slanderous treatment Corbyn got at the hands of the media and the Zionist lobby.
But of course, there are other routes into YP, chief is the creation of local YP branches (see also XR), something that the founders of YP are all too aware of, witness the battle over who controls the mailing lists of those who have signed up to YP. Apparently, a ‘technical’ structure (Peace and Justice Project Ltd, a registered company) of YP is responsible for the mailing lists, without which it’s very difficult for YP members to contact to each other and organise. And then Sultana has her own list, controlled by yet another company. This issue will come to the fore when those who have signed up to YP are asked to become paid up members. How many of the 750-800,000 will take this step? It will be at this point that the issue of local branches will be unavoidable. How will they be run? What will be the relationship between the local party and the centre and what role will XR play in this? This is where the issue of inner-party democracy will be decided or perhaps not. It’s apparent that the nature of the way the party came into existence is crucial to all these issues: The lack of a programme of action; the lack of a proposed party structure; the lack of transparency around the evolution of the party; all allegedly to be determined at the inaugural conference but what are the chances of this happening?
My biggest disappointment with the nascent Your Party is the fact that the support that YP got, almost overnight, shows just how much, so many people here are yearning for a real change from the same-old, same-old of what passes for British politics and it seems as if this support has been forgotten in the game of political musical chairs but we will have to see what transpires in the coming weeks and months but I have to say that I’m not optimistic as there are so many actors involved, each with their own agenda, some of which may well be nefarious (eg, indirectly, the state) that maintaining a coherent and targeted programme may be extremely difficult to pull off. Meanwhile, 100,000 people marched behind fascist thug Tommy Robinson…
Notes
1. “So overwhelming was that support that it scared the trade union bureaucrats who launched it, more than the bosses. They had thought it would attract only 50,000, not this unmanageable mob, and as a result Enough is Enough was still born. It soon turned into Where is Where. The union tops ensured that defeat was wrenched from the jaws of possibility.”
See https://theplanningmotivedotcom.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/your-party-towards-a-conference.pdf by Brian Green for a critique of the leadership and an alternative proposal for the setting up of Your Party.
2. See ‘Whose Party is it anyway?’ by Archie Woodrow for a pretty detailed account of the actors in this drama though he draws no conclusions.
And, https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1552/reject-this-dogs-dinner/ a critique of the preparations for Your Party.
And, Prometheus for a collection of essays on Your Party
Weekly Worker have assembled a collection of links to articles and critiques:
theleftlane2024.substack.com/p/polanski-pulverises-two-green-mps.↩︎
‘Taking off … despite the leadership’ Weekly Worker August 21: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1549/taking-off-despite-the-leadership.↩︎
‘Say it loud. Say it proud’ Weekly Worker September 4: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1551/say-it-loud-say-it-proud.↩︎
open.substack.com/pub/asawinstanley/p/will-corbyn-allow-zionists-to-sabotage.↩︎
medium.com/@maxshanly/born-for-life-or-marked-for-death-a12d87220e42.↩︎
www.youtube.com/live/pfE7j6WUD5M.↩︎
3. The tactic of entryism is probably as old as the Trotskyist parties are, I first experienced it in the early 1960s. Essentially, members of a Trotskyist party join the ‘target’ party and attempt to alter its programme/policies to conform to that of their party and/or encourage defections, thus undermining the target party. It should be noted that this might explain why Trotskyist parties are often infiltrated by the state in its attempt to neutralise the left.
The New Dark Age 
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